On a Wednesday morning in March, 19-year-old Devon Temple walked into his school’s computer lab and overheard two teachers talking about a classmate who’d been killed the day before.

“Tony?” Devon asked them.

“Tony Webb? With the fro?”

Devon and Tony grew up together in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. As kids, they’d drag a hoop into the street and play basketball on summer nights. They drifted apart as they got older, but they both attended an alternative high school called CCA Academy.

Tony chose CCA Academy after his social worker took him to a school fair at the Cook County juvenile courthouse. He’d missed a lot of school and wanted to get back on track. Tony’s mother had asked him many times if he wanted to take his classes online, but he preferred a more traditional high school experience.

On March 6, 2018, Tony put on a lilac collared shirt and black pants to fill out paperwork for his new job at a Portillo’s restaurant. Then he stopped to visit his girlfriend in Humboldt Park. Just before 8 p.m., as he walked to catch the bus home, Tony was shot once in his stomach. A half hour later, a doctor pronounced him dead.

The next day at school — on what would have been Tony’s 18th birthday — staff and students followed what has become a familiar routine for too many alternative high schools. A Chicago Public Schools crisis counselor sat among rocking chairs in the school’s peace room, ready to comfort anyone who came in. Devon and his civics teacher, Audrey Haywood, visited the counselor together. Seeing a teacher get emotional, “tore me up,” Devon said.

CCA students can count at least a dozen classmates and recent graduates who have died in the last several years, mostly by gunfire. After Tony was killed, Devon heard some students say: “People die every day. What of it?” For Devon, their response was as horrifying as the deaths themselves.

“It’s not normal to be that used to these things, even though, for us, it’s normal,” Devon said. “It’s not normal. It’s not.”

Higher death rates at alternative schools

Photo by April Alonso

A mural outside CCA Academy, an alternative school in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, commemorates lost lives.

While many CPS students have lost a classmate to gun violence, staff say it’s especially common in alternative high schools.

Some 425 Chicago public school students died between the 2013-14 and 2016-17 school years, according to a Chicago Reporter analysis of student transfer records. One in four attended an alternative high school, though these schools accounted for only around 2 percent of the district’s enrollment in that time period. Most of the alternative high schools where students died had a student body that was nearly all African-American.

CPS recorded 160 student deaths by gunfire in those years.It’s unclear if this is a comprehensive count, as district officials didn’t explain how they tracked shooting deaths.In response to a public records request, officials declined to say how many of these students attended alternative schools, saying doing so “has the potential to re-traumatize students and the community.”

These numbers don’t come close to capturing the damage wrought to families by gun violence, or the magnitude of loss felt by staff and students when a schoolmate is killed. They don’t include shooting deaths of recent graduates or dropouts. They don’t include students who were shot but survived.

There are a lot of reasons alternative schools have higher death rates. Many students were expelled or pushed out of traditional schools because of fights, arrests or gang involvement. They’re more likely than other Chicago high schoolers to live in or near neighborhoods with the highest homicide rates, a Reporter analysis of school and crime data shows. A two-decade-old national survey of alternative students — the only one of its kind — found a third had carried a weapon in the previous month and almost a fifth had attempted suicide within the previous year. Stresses students face today are likely worse.

Many alternative high schools are doing the best they can to help traumatized students with limited staff and funding. But until recently, district officials largely ignored alternative schools in this respect, even as they pumped millions into other schools to address students’ social and emotional needs. The turning point only came after student deaths spiked in alternative schools two years ago.

That lack of involvement stemmed in part from the fact that CPS outsources management of all but four of its 41 alternative schools to private operators, who face few consequences if they’re unable or unprepared to deal with student trauma. On top of that, privately run alternative schools tend to pay lower salaries and have higher staff turnover than traditional CPS schools — jeopardizing stability for students who need it the most.

Helping students cope with trauma

Photo by April Alonso

Rocking chairs are available in the peace room at CCA Academy, where students can go to seek grief counseling, calm down or talk about other issues at school.

Research has long shown that traumatic events like exposure to gun violence can greatly affect student learning. It gets worse if it happens over and over again. Kids may find it hard to concentrate on their work, may withdraw from their peers or act aggressively. A researcher who looked at nine years of crime and school data found that CPS students living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence fell farther behind their peers in safer neighborhoods as they got older, especially in math.

When students are killed, the classmates they were closest to are most affected. But the death of a well-known student can disrupt an entire school for days, or weeks. That happened two years ago at Innovations, an alternative high school in the Loop, when a popular 17-year-old basketball player was shot and killed and students saw video of his body on Instagram. School administrators got counseling for the whole basketball team and brought vans of grieving students to the funeral.

At Devon’s school, the death of 17-year-old Elijah Jones in December 2016 hit classmates especially hard because he was shot about an hour after he left school. Elijah had recently shown up to school with a black eye, Devon recalled. “You want to lend a hand,” he said, “but you can’t reach that far.”

The grieving rarely stops after the funeral. Students say they’re often reminded of deceased classmates on their birthday, at graduation or on the anniversary of their death. As a result, alternative school staff have tried to find ways to help students process what they’re feeling, sometimes by incorporating it into their lessons at school.

At McKinley Lakeside Leadership Academy in Bronzeville, Principal Irma Plaxico bought a hand-held machine that students use to make photo buttons of friends or family who’ve been killed. Last school year, Peace and Education Coalition High School in Back of the Yards, one of the four alternative schools managed by CPS, created a 10-week “first responders” class to teach students about the impact of trauma. After one student told teacher Stormie McNeal about watching a friend die, she brought in the Red Cross to certify students in CPR. McNeal plans to bring in an expert this year who can show students how to stop a bleeding gunshot wound.

“I realized we have to give them more tools to deal with these things,” McNeal said. “A lot of my students have been shot. It’s really scary to think about, but that type of training is needed.”

At CCA Academy, Devon and dozens of his classmates created a project in civics class that they called the “Face of Poverty.” Students scoured the internet for photos of every person who’d been shot and killed over the last two years in Chicago and used the images they found to make one giant face. Many students, their teacher said, knew five or six people on the poster.

Students also researched systemic problems, like poverty and segregation, that contribute to Chicago’s gun violence. The project helped 19-year-old Chyann McQueen understand why so many of her young black male friends had been shot and killed, and reinforced her desire to work for change in her community.

“I grew up with those people and to see their lives cut short, it made me want to know why,” she said. “I found why, and now I want to combat that… I know that even though a lot of people see this as their reality, it doesn’t have to be their reality.”

As students in hundreds of schools across the country walked out of class in mid-March to protest mass school shootings like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Chyann organized a walkout at her school, too.

CCA students used the protest not just to draw attention to classmates who’d been shot and killed, but to the lack of investment in Chicago’s segregated black and Hispanic neighborhoods where shootings are most likely to occur. On the street outside school, Devon and Chyann’s classmate, 18-year-old Odessey Stewart, yelled through a megaphone for better-funded schools, more jobs and more mental health centers in her community.

CCA students held paper tombstones for several classmates who’d died by gunfire, including one each for Tony, Elijah, and 16-year-old Pierre Loury, who was shot and killed by Chicago police in April 2016 after he allegedly pointed a gun at an officer. The students also chose to honor 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, a recent CCA grad whose death, while not a homicide, drew national attention after her body was found in a Rosemont hotel freezer last year.

Tony’s mother, Perinda Lee, felt both inspired and overwhelmed by the students’ protest after her son was killed. “I couldn’t believe that he was on a poster, that he was actually gone,” she said. “It kind of took my breath away.” After the walkout, students hung the tombstones in the computer room at school. A classmate brought Tony’s to his house; now it hangs in the bedroom he used to share with his younger brother.

When students see acknowledgment of what’s happening around them, it can be a source of catharsis.

But alternative school educators and students say they often feel like their classmates’ deaths are overlooked by the rest of the city. Contrast that with Baltimore, where in a ceremony outside the district’s headquarters the schools chief read the names and schools of every public school student who was shot and killed last year. After each name, a bell rang. Three of the nine students had attended the same alternative high school.

Inadequate staffing

Photo by Kalyn Belsha

A brown paper tree adorns the entrance to Ombudsman South with notes written by students. Ombudsman, which runs three alternative schools, began hosting a mental health summit after two dozen of their students were shot, killed or involved in shootings in one year.

CPS began beefing up staff and funding six years ago to help students cope with trauma. The district now employs a dozen or so specialists who train staff to address trauma and other social and emotional needs. But it wasn’t until last year that CPS targeted alternative schools. Before that, alternative schools themselves sought out trauma trainings from outside providers, which sometimes cost thousands of dollars. Now two CPS specialists work exclusively with alternative schools.

“We saw an opportunity to bring the work that we’ve been doing across the district to… a student population that has had a lot of needs in the last couple years,” said Justina Schlund, who directs the CPS office working to address trauma in schools. “Almost every single [alternative] school, right off the bat, wanted more supports from our team.”

These specialists also help schools apply for what’s known as a “restorative practices coach.” The coach works to reduce disciplinary referrals and improve a school’s internal climate. Over the last three school years, CPS paid for these coaches in about 120 schools. Last year, for the first time, four alternative schools got a coach.

When Elbert Thomas coached at Ombudsman South, he helped the staff set aside time to talk about their stressful and often frustrating jobs, a technique that can reduce burnout. “It was just so needed for them to have that… opportunity to vent and be heard,” he said.

CPS officials admit it took them longer to provide these supports to alternative schools because many of them are run by private operators that the district hasn’t always worked with closely.

For years, the district relied on a single nonprofit, Youth Connection Charter School, to run most of its alternative schools. Many YCCS schools, like CCA Academy, have deep roots in their communities. But five years ago, district officials let several out-of-town operators, some of which are run by for-profit companies, open more alternative schools.

Though social workers and school psychologists who work in alternative schools sometimes have smaller caseloads than clinicians who work in traditional schools — which are woefully under-staffed in this regard — many experts agree they still don’t have enough staff to meet their students’ mental health needs.

That’s been true for years at Peace and Education, where a social worker came just one day a week to meet with special education students. This school year, CPS is assigning a full-time social worker to the school, along with two other district-run alternative schools for young mothers and students incarcerated at Cook County Jail. The announcement came as such a shock to Peace and Education’s principal, Brigitte Swenson, that she had to re-read the email several times. “It’s a lot more than we’ve ever had,” she said.

Meanwhile, schools are doing a better job identifying issues rooted in trauma, which increases the number of students referred for more serious counseling.

On a recent Thursday morning, Ombudsman officials invited mental health providers and community groups to attend their second-annual “partnership summit.” Ombudsman, one of the district’s newer operators, started hosting the event after two dozen of their students were killed, shot or involved in a shooting in a year.

Dozens gathered at Ombudsman South, next to an abandoned fitness center in a Chicago Lawn strip mall. Inside the school’s entrance, a giant brown paper tree was filled with encouraging notes written by students. “I am more than my mental issues,” one student wrote. “I can take care/manage to control my PTSD and anxiety,” another message said.

One by one, each of Ombudsman’s three principals got up in front of the crowd, microphone in hand, and begged for help for their schools. One principal requested assistance with suicide prevention, student depression and anxiety. Another asked for mentors for Hispanic students in gangs. The third wanted help for students who get angry and shut down or abuse drugs and alcohol.

“We cannot do this without you,” said Lytina Lampley, the principal of Ombudsman West. “We need someone who’s going to come in and be committed to the work.”

“You have a chance right now”

“I don’t know how I have the strength to talk to y’all right now.”

Two years ago, Tammasha O’Neal stood before dozens of students from Sullivan House, a YCCS alternative high school in South Shore that’s had more student deaths than any other CPS school in recent years. That includes 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer, sparking citywide outrage.

“I don’t talk in front of people,” O’Neal continued. “But I have to now, because I’m dealing with this.” She motioned to the urn and death certificate of her 20-year-old son, Demetrius Archer, who’d been in and out of Sullivan House when he was killed in June 2016. He was shot sitting in a lawn chair around the corner from his mom’s apartment while hanging out with some friends.

When O’Neal heard that Sullivan House hosted an annual anti-violence ceremony, she volunteered to speak. She wanted to encourage her son’s classmates to get the diploma he never did.

“You have a chance right now,” she told them. “You’re at a school where… you mess up, they let you come back. Everybody don’t give you that opportunity.”

O’Neal wished her son had gotten more opportunities, like his older sister, who attended a selective-enrollment high school where she took advanced classes and went on college tours. If more students like her son got the mentoring, tutoring and other supports they needed, O’Neal said, fewer would end up in alternative schools.

“[Students] need more counselors and therapists at the schools,” she said. “Somebody that these kids can go and talk to when they’re dealing with issues of just trying to make it to school every day.”

In many ways, O’Neal felt her son had been ignored, even in death. For months, her son’s blood stained the sidewalk where he was shot. When O’Neal realized no one from the city was going to clean it up, she bought grey spray paint at the local hardware store and covered it herself.

After speaking at Sullivan House, O’Neal added a photo of her son to a wall at the school of other students who’d been killed. There were so many photos, she said, she had to find space for Demetrius. It gave her some hope to think that maybe her son’s classmates would stand there and repeat to themselves: “I don’t want to be on this wall. I don’t want to be on this wall.”

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/alternative-schools-bear-the-brunt-of-student-deaths-in-chicago/feed/0How Illinois obscures racial disparities in school discipline datahttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/how-illinois-obscures-racial-disparities-in-school-discipline-data/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/how-illinois-obscures-racial-disparities-in-school-discipline-data/#respondWed, 18 Jul 2018 18:58:01 +0000http://www.chicagoreporter.com/?p=2246091Last summer, several women gathered at Delia Barajas’ home. As part of the community group Ixchel, they tackle education issues like school discipline in the mostly Hispanic communities of Cicero and Berwyn.

But as the women searched the Illinois State Board of Education’s website for data about how students in their area had been disciplined, they hit a wall. They found the race and ethnicity of students who’d been disciplined in their local districts had been redacted. And many non-violent behaviors that led to suspensions had been lumped into one vague category: “other reason.”

Under a 2014 law, the state must publish data every year about how students are disciplined in school. Officials are supposed to include a breakdown by student race and ethnicity and indicate which behaviors triggered suspensions and expulsions.

Advocates say it’s important that school communities have access to this information because research has long shown that black students are disciplined more often and more severely than their classmates. And it’s often more subjective, non-violent behaviors — when students are labeled “defiant” or “disrespectful” — that drive discipline disparities.

But the state is concealing the race and ethnicity of students who are suspended and expelled from most school districts. Here’s why.

Why is the state redacting data?

State officials say they have to redact race and ethnicity data to comply with federal and state requirements about protecting student privacy. They’ve decided that to do that, they won’t reveal any student groups that are smaller than 10 — a common practice in government reports. But Illinois officials say they also have to remove data on student groups much larger than 10 to protect the identity of students in smaller groups. As a result, few school districts have any race or ethnicity data.

Here’s how that looks in practice: Say a school district gave out 309 suspensions and 100 went to black children, 100 went to Hispanic children, 100 went to white children and nine went to multiracial children. State officials have redacted all of the race and ethnicity data in their reports to protect the nine multiracial students. They say a “reasonable person” could look at the total, do the math and identify individual students.

Why is this a problem?

Those who advocated for the 2014 data law say the state is undermining larger school discipline reform efforts by removing key data from its public reports that would allow members of the public to spot possible racial discrimination, track progress and hold school officials accountable.

“When we saw the data I was like ‘Oh my god, what the hell are we supposed to do with this?” said Raul Botello, who co-directs the Chicago-based nonprofit Communities United, in an interview this past fall. “It’s horrible.”

Individual school districts don’t always make this information public. The federal government publishes similar data, but it’s two or three years old by the time it’s released. As a result, school officials can claim they’ve made changes, or shouldn’t be judged by the old numbers if there’s a new administration. In Chicago, for example, there’s been four CEOs in just three years.

Is there any way to get unredacted data?

The Chicago Reporter filed an open records request last year to obtain the unredacted race and ethnicity data. The Illinois State Board of Education denied this request, citing student privacy concerns. The state’s attorney general’s office agreed ISBE could redact the data.

Download the data:

Click here to see how often your school district suspends and expels black, white, and Hispanic students.

Source: Loyola University Chicago

But a Loyola University Chicago clinical law professor, Miranda Johnson, together with a team of graduate students, managed to pry loose some of the state’s discipline data for black, white and Hispanic students. Johnson provided this data to The Chicago Reporter.

This data offers a better picture of school discipline in hundreds of districts across the state. For example, let’s look at the most recent data for Rockford Public Schools. It’s Illinois’ fifth-largest school district with more than 28,000 students. The state’s public report indicates only that Rockford suspended students from school 6,575 times in the 2016-17 school year. All race and ethnicity data has been redacted.

Loyola’s data, paired with district demographic data, show that black students were suspended much more often than white students.

Race & ethnicity

Times suspended

% of all suspensions

% of student enrollment

Black

4,288

65%

31%

White

1,018

15%

31%

Hispanic

727

11%

27%

Are the redactions necessary to protect student privacy?

An attorney for the Illinois State Board of Education says the agency’s redaction policy “reflects best and standard practices.” But legal experts say Illinois’ precautions exceed those taken by other states and the federal government.

The U.S. Department of Education reveals student groups that are smaller than 10. It reports rounded values with a de-identification technique known as “blurring.” But Illinois officials chose not to do this.

Frank LoMonte, who directs the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, says public education agencies often go beyond what the federal government expects them to do to protect student privacy. But Illinois’ approach to redacting student discipline data is an “over-compliance beyond what I’m accustomed to seeing,” LoMonte said in a May interview. “It doesn’t seem plausible that anyone can make that match [to an individual student] or take the time to do it.”

How are communities responding?

Some parents and community groups have filed public records requests with their local districts or contacted lawyers to get better school discipline data. Ixchel, for example, held an educational forum in Cicero last fall with the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

An attorney from that group provided parents with more detailed discipline data that the organization obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Act. After seeing that, many parents expressed concern.

“That’s what we wanted to do… to make sure there is awareness because the school district isn’t relaying this to students, parents and the communities,” Ixchel’s Barajas said.

Are changes on the horizon?

After the redacted reports appeared on the state’s website, State Sen. Kimberly Lightford and advocacy groups told state officials about their concerns. But nothing changed.

So Lightford introduced a bill earlier this year that would require Illinois to use the federal government’s disclosure method, which would result in the publication of more race and ethnicity data. The state would also be required to report more data about behaviors that trigger suspensions and expulsions. That would include crucial categories that drive disparities, such as disruption, disrespect and defiance of authority, dress code violations and being late or cutting class. Right now, all of those reasons are lumped together in the “other reason” category.

State officials say they have concerns about the bill, but declined to elaborate. “ISBE believes we need to maintain strong protections for students’ privacy,” spokeswoman Megan Griffin wrote in an email. The Illinois Principals Association opposes the bill. The advocacy group says it’s too soon to change how discipline data is collected and published. The bill hasn’t made it out of committee; advocates say it’s unlikely to be taken up before the fall.

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/how-illinois-obscures-racial-disparities-in-school-discipline-data/feed/0As school discipline disparities worsen, Illinois has yet to require reformshttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/as-school-discipline-disparities-worsen-illinois-has-yet-to-require-reforms/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/as-school-discipline-disparities-worsen-illinois-has-yet-to-require-reforms/#respondWed, 18 Jul 2018 18:57:44 +0000http://www.chicagoreporter.com/?p=2246026Four years ago, Illinois passed the first in a series of discipline reforms meant to reduce student suspensions and expulsions from public schools.

The law tasks state officials with two responsibilities: Make school discipline data available to the public, and require districts with the consistently highest suspension and expulsion rates to improve.

At the time, there was national momentum to address discipline disparities, especially for black students, who are suspended and expelled from school far more often than their white classmates. In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidance to reduce discipline that removes students from class and interrupts their learning. Advocates and lawmakers knew Illinois needed to make drastic changes after a 2012 report by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found the state’s suspension rate for black students was the highest in the nation.

But the 2014 law hasn’t had the outcomes legislators intended. The Illinois State Board of Education redacts the race and ethnicity of nearly all students who’ve been suspended or expelled, so parents and school communities can’t see what’s happening in their local districts. On top of that, the state board hasn’t required districts with the consistently highest suspension and expulsion rates to make any changes.

Parents, legislators and community advocates say they’re frustrated by the lack of transparency and accountability.

“Who is responsible for our students to succeed?” asked Delia Barajas, a former Cicero public school parent who works to inform southwest suburban residents about school discipline issues. “Why isn’t [the Illinois State Board of Education] coming down on these school districts?”

State. Sen. Kimberly Lightford, who championed several school discipline reforms, including the 2014 law, has been meeting with state education officials to discuss the problems for months.

“It’s frustrating that you work hard to try to get something done and when it actually becomes law, the law isn’t implemented the way it should be,” she said in an April interview.

Lightford, who represents much of Chicago’s Austin neighborhood and parts of the western suburbs, introduced a new bill this spring that would improve discipline data transparency. Facing opposition from the state and school administrator groups, that bill did not make it out of committee. Lightford also sponsored other legislation now on the governor’s desk that clarifies the state’s intervention responsibilities.

Advocates say some of the reforms are working as intended. Suspensions and expulsions have fallen dramatically across all racial and ethnic groups in recent years, especially since the state ended strict “zero tolerance” policies and limited suspensions and expulsions in 2016.

From the 2015 to 2017 school year, districts suspended 26,000 fewer students from school, according to the latest data available. That represented about a one-third drop. Schools expelled 540 fewer students, cutting the number in half.

But that progress isn’t happening equally. Discipline rates fell more quickly for white students than black students, making existing disparities worse. An analysis by The Chicago Reporter shows that in 2015, black students were about four and a half times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled from school. Two years later, they were about six times more likely to be suspended or expelled. (The Reporter looked at students in kindergarten to 12th grade because very few preschool students were suspended and none were expelled.)

Advocates like 25-year-old Carlil Pittman say the overall decline in suspensions and expulsions is encouraging, but the persistent disparities show there is more work to do. Pittman started pushing for reforms after he was expelled nearly a decade ago as a sophomore from Kelly High School in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.

“We can’t 100 percent end disparities,” said Pittman, an organizer with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, which has successfully lobbied for several changes to school discipline laws. “But being able to make a huge impact on the overall [suspension and expulsion numbers] and push them in the right direction” puts the state on a path toward closing the gaps.

Illinois mirrors what’s happening nationally. A recent U.S. Government Accountability Officereport found that while the number of students suspended and expelled across the country is falling, black students, especially boys, are still suspended and expelled at much higher rates.

Illinois delays identifying problem districts

Under the 2014 law, the state must identify districts with the highest suspension and expulsion rates and the worst racial and ethnic disparities each year. If districts are flagged for any of these reasons for three years in a row, they have to write an improvement plan.

Last school year, state officials were supposed to require districts that had been flagged three times to start making discipline changes. But they put off that responsibility.

The state didn’t notify districts that were flagged for 2015, 2016 and 2017 until the end of last month. Critics say waiting to tell districts where they stood prevented some schools from making improvements sooner.

According to the state, these flags are “unofficial” and districts don’t have to do anything. State officials are choosing to wait until October to require districts to make changes. They say they’re complying with Lightford’s legislation that, if signed into law, would give districts more time to write their improvement plans. (The legislation has been on Gov. Bruce Rauner’s desk for three weeks; the state board expects he will sign it.)

The state says it will publish “official” lists of districts that have to make improvements this fall, using 2016, 2017 and 2018 discipline data. After that, districts will get 90 days to write their plans.

The state said it would publicly post the lists of districts that had been “unofficially” flagged. It didn’t. The Reporter requested and obtained them through the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The lists show:

A total of 83 districts were flagged during the 2015, 2016 and 2017 school years for high suspension rates, high expulsion rates or suspending and expelling students of color more often than white students.

Fifty-nine districts were flagged for having high suspension rates for three straight years. According to a Reporter analysis, these districts suspended over 9 percent of their K-12 students last year — a rate four times higher than the rest of the state. These districts also disproportionately enrolled mostly black students.

Only one district, Danville School District 118, was flagged for having a high expulsion rate for three straight years.

Twenty-six districts, including Chicago Public Schools, were flagged for disciplining students of color more often than white students for three straight years.

Researchers caution that districts self-report their discipline data and may feel pressure to under-report suspensions and expulsions to avoid ending up on these lists.

Download the data:

Click here to see whether your district was flagged for its suspension or expulsion rate.

Source: Illinois State Board of Education

To the state, “these lists are not about highlighting bad actors,” but rather identifying districts that need more support, Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Jackie Matthews said. In the fall, state officials will tell districts what needs to go in their improvement plans, but it remains unclear how the state will evaluate and monitor them. The state will also connect these districts to others that successfully reduced their suspension and expulsion rates so they can get advice.

If districts fail to improve, they have to make annual progress reports to the state, but there are no other consequences. State officials rarely punish districts by withholding funds. They say even if they wanted to, there’s no money tied to school discipline to take away.

Some advocates say they were willing to delay holding districts accountable because the legislation awaiting the governor’s signature also created a grant program that could give districts money to work on their discipline problems. But right now, the grant program has no money allocated to it. Lightford’s office hopes to get state money set aside for the grants by the 2019-2020 school year.

Photo by April Alonso

The state flagged 59 districts, including J.S. Morton High School District 201 in Cicero, for having high suspension rates three years in a row. Last year, the district suspended students at a rate more than two and a half times the state’s average.

Districts need more staff to make improvements

Many of the districts that were flagged by the state pointed to their successes in reducing suspensions and expulsions as evidence they are on the right track. Data show suspensions dropped by a third in districts that were flagged for high suspension rates three years in a row. But because these districts started off with higher suspension rates and the rest of the state saw similar declines during that time, they didn’t catch up.

Over the past several weeks, The Reporter interviewed officials from eight school districts that were flagged for their high or disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates. All of these administrators said they’d already taken steps to improve.

Many revamped their in-school suspension rooms to add more tutoring supports or designated “safe” rooms where students can go to calm down. Some districts added rewards for good behavior and attendance, like exemptions from final exams or permission to leave school grounds for lunch.

“The social worker is [not] going to be the silver bullet … Not just one thing is going to work.” – Superintendent Mike Schiffman, Freeport School District 145

Adding and training staff was a common approach. Districts brought in experts to help staff better understand the effects of trauma on students and to develop more awareness of students’ cultural differences. They also focused on how personal biases — conscious or not — can lead staff to treat students differently at school.

Many hired social workers, school psychologists and behavior interventionists. Others appointed an administrator to oversee students’ social and emotional needs.

In Freeport School District 145, not far from the Wisconsin border, Superintendent Mike Schiffman said he’d been taking a different approach to discipline since he and several other administrators started working for the district three years ago. He hired deans to focus on discipline, more full-time social workers and new behavior specialists who work with teachers in elementary school classrooms.

To pay for the added staff, district officials used some of the additional money they recently received after the state overhauled its school funding formula, and made cuts to supplies, trips and other personnel.

And while Freeport is suspending fewer students — about 9 percent of K-12 students were suspended last year compared to about 14 percent of students two years earlier — the district still has one of the highest suspension rates in the state.

Schiffman says it’s difficult to improve the behavior of older students and it takes time for changes to take root in younger ones.

“We’ve really decided we’re going to focus our attention on the elementary and then continue to work our way up,” Schiffman said. “The social worker is [not] going to be the silver bullet.’ We have to work on [positive behavior interventions], we have to work on student engagement. Not just one thing is going to work.”

If signed into law and funded, the state’s new grant program would allow districts flagged for their suspension and expulsion rates to apply for money to hire additional staff. Most districts interviewed by The Reporter said they needed more staff to help traumatized students and others with mental health needs, but had trouble affording or finding them.

Matt Vosberg, the deputy superintendent of Rockford Public Schools, said the district has added three social workers since he started seven years ago, but it’s a drop in the bucket.

“We probably need at least 20 more,” he said.

Rockford has had one of the state’s highest suspension rates in recent years. Last year, the district suspended more than one in 10 students in kindergarten to 12th grade. Vosberg said it’s possible districts like his have higher suspension rates because the students deal with greater challenges. Rockford has a high percentage of students who change schools — twice the state’s average — and a higher-than-average percentage of children living in poverty.

“Obviously, suspensions are just a symptom of other issues,” Vosberg said.

“It’s a lot of hard conversations”

Districts that were flagged by the state for their suspension and expulsion rates say they’ve had frank conversations with students and staff about the role race plays in discipline. And they are having in-person conversations with students and their families to better understand why kids act out.

Chicago Public Schools has long suspended and expelled African-American boys at rates much higher than their classmates. To address those inequities, district officials say they’ve paid to train entire school staffs in trauma and relationship-building strategies. They say they’ve also sent specialists and restorative practice coaches to schools with the highest discipline rates.

“CPS is committed to a restorative approach to discipline focused on social-emotional learning to address underlying issues, teach students conflict resolution, and keep students in school where they belong,” district spokeswoman Emily Bolton said in a written statement.

Danville School District 118, about 140 miles south of Chicago, was the only district the state flagged for having both high suspension and expulsion rates. (Only a handful of districts expel enough students to be scrutinized under state law.)

To improve discipline rates, the district’s superintendent, Alicia Geddis, started meeting with all students returning to school after they’d been expelled or sent to juvenile detention about three years ago. Those conversations led her to realize that students needed counseling that went beyond what the district was offering.

“School was a safe place to let out some of that aggression because people would notice,” Geddis said. “We found out some of our kids were coming here to act out because they thought somebody would do something about it.”

This past fall, Geddis asked a nonprofit agency to move into a building that used to house Danville administrators. Now, the nonprofit provides mental health services to some 80 students. Geddis also hired counselors to make home visits.

Belleville Township School District 201, just across the river from St. Louis, is one of seven districts that the state flagged for both having a high suspension rate and disciplining students of color more often than white students.

Superintendent Jeff Dosier said it’s important “to acknowledge that those gaps are there.” He said his staff is focusing intently on developing closer relationships with students so they feel comfortable telling adults what’s affecting their behavior at school.

“It’s better to talk about those issues directly with the students who are involved… than to just give somebody a consequence and send them home and basically forget about them,” Dosier said. “We talk to them about what happened and what we’re going to do to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Having tough conversations has also played a role in reforming school discipline at Community High School District 99 in Downers Grove. The state flagged the district for its suspension and expulsion disparities three years in a row. Data provided by the district to the Reporter show the district suspends fewer than 160 students — a rate close to the state’s average — but last year, black students were seven times more likely to be suspended than white students.

To address those gaps, this year educators looked at more serious behaviors that triggered suspensions, like fighting, to see if they had resulted in the same punishment regardless of student race or gender. According to their analysis, teachers were fair. This summer a team will examine less severe offenses, like cursing, that can accumulate and lead to a suspension. They’ll pull individual student records and evaluate each referral.

“It’s a lot of hard conversations about… do we respond the same way regardless of gender, ethnicity, background, what they’re wearing and what their hair color is?” Superintendent Hank Thiele said. “We’re working toward that. But can I tell you that [implicit bias] is out of our system? No, because it’s not out of society.”

Critics say more than 26 districts should have been flagged for their racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions, but the law is written in a way that allows some districts to escape oversight. The state has to compare how often white students are suspended and expelled to how often non-white students are suspended and expelled — as one group. If a district enrolls many students from minority groups with lower discipline rates, it can mask higher rates for black and Hispanic students.

Pursuing alternatives

Several administrators of districts flagged by the state said they’d run into roadblocks while trying to reduce their suspension and expulsion rates.

They echoed the findings of a March report from Teach Plus, an education advocacy group. The group surveyed about 400 teachers across Illinois. Just under half of teachers felt ending zero-tolerance policies and limiting suspensions and expulsions had made the climate inside schools worse over the last two years. Teachers reported feeling unsupported and said administrators had too few disciplinary alternatives.

“Just because kids aren’t being suspended doesn’t mean we’re not disciplining, it’s just discipline in a different manner.” – Jason Wind, Springfield Public Schools

In East Peoria Community High School District 309, Superintendent Marjorie Greuter said her teachers feel like they’ve lost incentives that used to keep students from misbehaving. In 2017, the district had the state’s ninth-highest suspension rate.

In the past, Greuter said, students “begged” to go to a social isolation room at school because they could get credit for doing their work there. If they got suspended and sent home, they received a zero on their assignments. But now that the state law gives suspended students the right to make up missed work, students prefer going home over sitting in social isolation. Staff see that as letting them off the hook with “no punishment.”

“It’s been terribly difficult for my teachers to understand [that]… it’s not that we’re being soft on kids, it’s to make sure we’re not violating their rights,” Greuter said. “It’s been a hard transition.”

Jason Wind, who’s worked in Springfield Public Schools for 25 years, said it was hard for some staff to see behaviors that used to get students suspended or sent to an alternative school no longer merited those punishments. Now, Wind said, the district does more of its interventions at school, such as assigning students a mentor.

“We’ve had complaints [from staff] that schools are more out of control,” said Wind, the district’s director of school support.Last year, the district had the state’s 13th-highest suspension rate. “Just because kids aren’t being suspended doesn’t mean we’re not disciplining, it’s just discipline in a different manner.”

This story has been updated to clarify The Chicago Reporter verbally requested the Illinois State Board of Education provide the lists of districts flagged for disciplinary practices. ISBE required a written Freedom of Information request to provide those records.

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/as-school-discipline-disparities-worsen-illinois-has-yet-to-require-reforms/feed/0Lawsuit seeks to stop school closing, alleging racial discriminationhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/lawsuit-seeks-to-stop-school-closing-alleging-racial-discrimination/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/lawsuit-seeks-to-stop-school-closing-alleging-racial-discrimination/#commentsTue, 19 Jun 2018 17:23:59 +0000http://www.chicagoreporter.com/?p=2194924Four parents of National Teachers Academy students are suing Chicago Public Schools to stop the district from closing their elementary school in the South Loop and turning it into a neighborhood high school.

In a lawsuit filed today, the parentsallege that district officials used a racially discriminatory metric to close NTA — a decision they say will academically harm the mostly low-income and African-American students who will have to transfer to a new school. They also allege that CPS failed to follow a 2011 state law that governs school closures and mergers.

Photo by April Alonso

Parents, lawyers and other community members gathered outside National Teachers Academy on Tuesday as eighth-grade students celebrated their graduation. In recent months, many students have been outspoken critics of the district’s plans to turn NTA into a high school and to close four high schools on the city’s South Side.

“While a new high school in the South Loop may be convenient and desirable, CPS may not accomplish this goal by using discriminatory criteria, disproportionately burdening African-American schoolchildren and flouting important provisions in the law,” the lawsuit states.

The parents, along with an NTA parent group and an organization that works on school integration issues, are represented by attorneys at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, LAF (formerly the Legal Assistance Foundation) and the private firm Eimer Stahl.

In late February, the CPS School Boardvoted to close NTA over several years, eventuallysending all its students to the nearby South Loop Elementary School and turning its building into a high school that would serve parts of the South Loop, Bronzeville, Bridgeport and Chinatown by 2024. The same day, board members voted to phase out three Englewood high schools and close a fourth, as CPS builds a new $85 million high school for the neighborhood that will open next year.

They mark the first official closures since the expiration of a five-year moratorium on shutting down schools, which was put into place in 2013 when CPS closed 50 schools.

In an emailed statement, district spokeswoman Emily Bolton defended CPS’s plan for NTA, saying it would create more diverse schools in the neighborhood, give NTA families access to the “top elementary school in the area” and provide a better high school option for families that often send their older kids outside the neighborhood.

The lawsuit says it’s unfair that NTA kids will have to bear the brunt of that transition and lose services like a low-cost health center and Park District programming.

Parents and lawyers for the case held a press conference outside NTA as 8th graders gathered for their graduation.

“Today has been a long time coming,” said Elisabeth Greer, who chairs NTA’s Local School Council and will have children in third grade and kindergarten at the school this fall. “We have protested at community meetings, we have protested at board meetings and we have protested in the streets. And CPS has ignored us. Starting today, we will be ignored no longer.”

Photo by April Alonso

Denetta Jones is one of four parents who is suing Chicago Public Schools to prevent the district from closing National Teachers Academy in the South Loop and turning the building into a high school. Her daughters, who are going into sixth and fourth grades at NTA, already went through a school closure in 2013.

One of those parents is Denetta Jones, who has children going into sixth and fourth grades at NTA and lives in public housing not far from the school. She enrolled her children there in 2015 after district officials closed her kids’ elementary school, Goodlow. According to the lawsuit and testimony Jones gave at a public hearing, her children struggled academically and emotionally at their designated receiving school, but have been doing better since transferring to NTA.

“Please do not close the school because my daughters have already been through an emotional trauma being displaced from one school,”Jones told district officials in January. “I do not want them to go through that again.”

Today, Jones said she was looking forward to telling her kids about the lawsuit, after they’d sat through many public meetings about their school’s uncertain fate.

In 2013, apair of federal lawsuits, backed by the Chicago Teachers Union, alleged that the district’s proposed mass closures would disproportionately hurt special education students. They also said the closures discriminated against the mostly African-American students who’d be impacted.

A federal judgeruled that parents who filed one of the lawsuits failed to prove the students would suffer academically because they’d been assigned to higher-performing schools.

That’s a question at the center of this lawsuit, too.

To show the potential for academic harm, lawyers point to arecent study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research that found students impacted by the city’s 2013 mass closures had lower math and reading test scores the year the closures were announced and suffered long-term academic and emotional effects.

The lawsuit says the school NTA kids will have to transfer to, South Loop Elementary, isn’t higher-performing. The schools received the same top-tier ranking from the district, but CPS said South Loop had higher test scores. The lawsuit says it’s racially discriminatory to use this metric, as test scores are often an indicator of opportunities children had prior to starting school, while academic growth over time shows how much children learned in school.

The lawsuit also alleges that CPS offered inadequate transition plans for the NTA students and failed to provide evidence that members of the community requested to turn NTA into a high school before CPS put out its own proposal.

CPS says black students both score higher and grow faster at South Loop Elementary, and that the district is devoting significant financial and staff resources to transition students from NTA to their new school.

Candace Moore, a lawyer for the NTA parents, said she thought the case stood a better chance than similar discrimination lawsuits filed over past school closures because it focused on one school and a district policy that allegedly led directly to discrimination, instead of many schools and decisions that were not part of any official policy.

“We think there is a pretty clear-cut case,” Moore said.

This story has been updated since publishing.

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/lawsuit-seeks-to-stop-school-closing-alleging-racial-discrimination/feed/1Study: After mass school closings, impacted students lagged academicallyhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/study-after-mass-school-closings-impacted-students-lagged-academically/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/study-after-mass-school-closings-impacted-students-lagged-academically/#commentsTue, 22 May 2018 18:01:55 +0000http://www.chicagoreporter.com/?p=2101535Lamont Morton Jr. was in fourth grade when Chicago school officials closed his West Side elementary school in 2013. Lamont transferred to a “welcoming school” a few blocks away, where officials said he and other students from his closed school would receive the supports they needed to make the transition.

Before the closure, Lamont’s teachers had recommended his parents seek out a selective school where Lamont would face greater academic challenges. But after changing schools, Lamont fell behind in math and he had to stay after school to catch up.

“Some of the stuff I needed to do was complicated and they needed to help me get where I needed to be,” Lamont told me in February 2017, as I interviewed him and his dad, Lamont Morton Sr., in their Austin home.

Morton said he noticed Lamont and his younger brother both were struggling, and he suspected the stressful transfer to a new school had something to do with it.

“I know as you get older, things get harder, but [Lamont’s] never had to have any kind of extra help with math or any of that stuff because he’s always loved school,” Morton said. “But it’s not the same now. Now it’s like if he could stay away from there, he would.”

Like Lamont, thousands of students experienced negative academic outcomes after the 2013 school closures, despite the fact officials promised them a better education, according to a sweeping report released Tuesday by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

The study is the most comprehensive yet to evaluate the educational, social and emotional impacts of the city’s decision to close an unprecedented 50 schools five years ago.

The study offers a close-up look at outcomes for the 10,700 students who were in kindergarten to 7th grade at the time of the closures, as well as the 13,200 students who attended the schools that took in displaced kids. (The study doesn’t include students who transferred out of Chicago’s public schools.)

Using a combination of data, surveys and interviews with students and school staff, researchers compared the experiences of impacted students, most of whom were black and low-income, with students in similarly under-enrolled and low-performing schools that were not closed or designated to take in kids.

They reach this conclusion, bolstered by earlier research in Chicago and other cities: “Closing under-enrolled schools may seem like a viable solution to policymakers who seek to address fiscal deficits and declining enrollment, but our findings show that closing schools caused large disruptions without clear benefits for students.”

While officials said the main reason they closed schools in 2013 was to save money, the district has never reported if it did.

One of the most troubling findings is that students from closed schools saw long-term negative effects in math. Students tested two months behind their peers in math the year the closures were announced. That gap persisted for four years. Researchers think this could be due to how children learn math: if they miss a key concept early on, it’s more difficult to progress.

Students in the closing schools were also about one and a half months behind their peers in reading the year the closures were announced. Those reading scores rose back up to expected levels two years later. Students in the welcoming schools tested about one and half months behind their peers in reading the first year after the closures — though their scores also rebounded the next year.

Researchers say they hope these findings will be taken into consideration as Chicago and other school districts across the country weigh the pros and cons of closing schools. Chicago officials imposed a five-year ban on shutting down schools after 2013. That ends this year.

Already, district officials plan to close four under-enrolled, majority-black high schools in Englewood on the city’s South Side and to turn a majority-black South Loop elementary school into a high school, despite the fact it doesn’t meet the low academic or enrollment criteria officials have used to close schools in the past.

“There are a lot of important lessons learned in terms of how to make improvements in the future,” said Senior Research Analyst Molly F. Gordon, who co-authored the study.

Researchers found that school closings had no impact on school suspension rates nor absenteeism for any of the student groups. (Though they point out this result coincided with the start of a district policy aimed at reducing suspensions and expulsions.)

Some effects took years to detect. While researchers found that students from the closed schools’ GPA in the core subjects of English, math, science and social studies rose at first, by the third and fourth years after the closures, they were lower than expected compared to their peers.

This impact was most noticeable among the estimated 4,000 students who were in 3rd to 5th grades when their schools closed.

This indicator is a key predictor of whether students will stay on track and graduate from high school — more so than test scores. Researchers say it’s possible that because students from closed schools were often labeled as “low performers” by school staff, it shook their confidence and, in turn, they did worse.

Photo by Max Herman

Lamont Morton Jr. attended Emmet Elementary in Austin before district officials closed it in 2013. Like many students, he fell behind in math when he transferred to his nearby “welcoming” school.

Eve Ewing, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who is writing a book about the impacts of the 2013 school closures that will be released in October, says these academic effects are a cause for concern.

“All of this is happening in an extremely competitive high school admissions environment in Chicago where we have thousands and thousands of students competing for limited spots in certain schools,” she said. “What seems like a small difference [in grades or test scores] is actually substantial.”

The report’s authors also spent time interviewing students and staff at six welcoming schools, looking for commonalities among their experiences. The findings validate much of what parents, students, educators and school communities have said for years: the mergers were rushed and poorly planned, which made it hard for schools to properly support their students.

While schools appreciated the iPads and extra money CPS gave them during the first year, staff said they received little training on how to use the new technology and when the one-time infusion of cash ran out after a year or so, supports like extra social workers disappeared.

Staff at the welcoming schools reported starting in the fall of 2013 without important supplies — some of which the district lost permanently. Educators interpreted this “as a sign that the district did not respect staff or care about the students in these schools.”

The way the closures played out also hurt the surveyed schools’ internal cultures, researchers found. Before the mergers, schools in the same neighborhoods felt like they were “pitted against” one another in an emotional, months-long battle to keep their schools open. This, coupled with the chaotic transition, “resulted in feelings of anger and resentment across communities,” the report states.

Staff and students in welcoming schools also reported an increase in student fights and bullying, especially the first year after the closures. While that improved with time, the staff’s perceptions of conflict remained higher than before the mergers, and students reported that early stereotypes about them persisted.

In one case, students heard welcoming school staff talking about how kids who came in from the closed school had lower test scores.

“Like on my first day back here, even the teachers would even say, ‘Oh, you’re a [closed school] kid, so you’re lower than the rest of the kids, ‘cause [the welcoming school was] such a high [scoring] school,’” one student told the researchers.

Educators said they needed the district to provide more support and training on merging schools, more emotional support for staff and additional funding and emotional supports for students beyond the first year after a closure.

Chicago Public Schools’ CEO, Janice Jackson, admits that the way the district handled the 2013 closures — under different leadership — was “imperfect.” She says the district learned from those shutdowns; she doesn’t intend to carry out any more widespread closures.

As evidence of the district’s progress, she pointed to the district’s plan to give additional funding and supports beyond the first year to students in the Englewood high schools that are slated to close. (Though some critics point out the district had planned to shut down these schools more quickly and with fewer supports before a community outcry.)

When asked if the students the report showed had been harmed by the 2013 school closures were owed anything, Jackson said: “I think what we owe the students is what we’re doing,” pointing to a rise in the number of top-rated schools in the district since the closures five years ago.

“While we know that there was some impact based on those who participated in the closings and those that didn’t, I think it’s important to note that these students are still progressing,” she said.

But that hasn’t done much for Lamont and his dad, who has long dreamed that he could move to another community, perhaps in the suburbs, where his kids could “shine like I know they can.”

“I just think people are still paying for [the closures] and probably going to pay for it for a while,” Morton told me last year. “And unfortunately, we just happened to be one of the families that is.”